14-Year Old Survived Without Heart For 4 Months

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-Staff

By Staff

Friday, November 21, 2008, 12:09

D'Zhana Simmons, 14, from South Carolina has survived without a heart for four months. She was diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy a condition that causes the heart to become enlarged and too weak to sufficiently pump blood.

Simmons was attached to a custom-built artificial blood-pumping device for 118 days. All the while the teenager was alert, eating and walking around the hospital room with a blinking photocopier-size ventricular assist device that was attached to her chest to pump and cleanse her blood.

"It was like I was a fake person, like I didn't really exist. I was just here," the New York Post quoted her as saying at her triumphant press conference at Holtz Children's Hospital in Miami. "But I know that I really was here," she added.

Simmons underwent a a transplant on july 2, at the Holtz Children's Hospital, but after two days they had to do an emergency surgery to remove it because it was not functioning properly and risked a deadly rupture. "In the past, this situation could have been lethal," Dr. Marco Ricci, director of paediatric cardiac surgery at the University of Miami, said.

Ricci modified the substitute heart chambers with a special fabric then hooked the patient's aorta and ventricle to the pumps. "She essentially lived for 118 days without a heart, with her circulation supported only by two blood pumps," Ricci said.

"This, we believe, is the first paediatric patient who has received such a device in this configuration without the heart, and possibly one of the youngest," he added.

As for young Simmons, it was a tough time of her life, as her other organs were also affected."You never knew when it would malfunction," she said. The teenager kept fighting back, and also went for walks with the device, while being closely watch by four medical staffs. However the second transplant was a success on the 29th October.